Vendorful: Smarter sourcing for buyers and vendors

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One of the best things about working on an eSourcing platform is that I get to talk to people in an incredibly broad set of fields because procurement is a universal function across all enterprises in all verticals. Since I talk to such a broad range of people, it is always striking when I hear the same complaints over and over again: it suggests the existence of a big problem.

Acronyms were so much easier in the late 20th century. When it came to “cloud stuff,” all anyone talked about were ASPs, or Application Service Providers. This caused some confusion because asp was also the extension that web sites running on the Microsoft stack used. Asp was (and is) the name used to refer to several species of venomous snakes, which while cool, probably didn’t add to any confusion. Then, as if bitten by an asp, the ASP acronym began to die. It was ultimately replaced by the term SaaS, or Software as aService. It’s unclear whether the mixed case approach to the acronym that was the draw or if it was just plain convenient to have “as a Service” on the tail end of the expression, but SaaS took off and was ultimately responsible for the creation of a variety of derivative acronyms.